Politics

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The perfecting of autonomous cars would do many good things (fight pollution, reduce highway deaths) and some bad (threaten job security for millions, be a scary target for hackers). Like most technologies, the size of the victories will be determined by how we manage the losses.

One thing that almost assuredly happens during a robocar age will be a decrease in traffic, due in large part to the end of the maddening search for parking spots.

From Peter Wayner at the Atlantic:

There’s plenty of research showing that a surprisingly large number of people are driving, trying to find a place to leave their car. A group called Transportation Alternatives studied the flow of cars around one Brooklyn neighborhood, Park Slope, and found that 64 percent of the local cars were searching for a place to park. It’s not just the inner core of cities either. Many cars in suburban downtowns and shopping-mall parking lots do the same thing.

Robot cars could change all that. The unsticking of the urban roads is one of the side effects of autonomous cars that will, in turn, change the landscape of cities— essentially eliminating one of the enduring symbols of urban life, the traffic jam full of honking cars and fuming passengers. It will also redefine how we use land in the city, unleashing trillions of dollars of real estate to be used for more than storing cars. Autonomous cars are poised to save us uncountable hours of time, not just by letting us sleep as the car drives, but by unblocking the roads so they flow faster.•

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Rand Paul’s Weimar-like hyper-inflation hasn’t quite come to pass

UPDATED msnbc

Paul Krugman was eviscerated for a Rolling Stone cover he wrote in 2014 about the accomplishments of the Obama Administration. It was mostly Liberals who were enraged, feeling the President had betrayed his promise. But the progress in the country in many areas was real, and since then environmentalism and diplomacy and science and civil rights have advanced in a number of ways. Gerrymandering and Citizens United are still among very real problems, but I never let political purity get in the way of important victories.

In Krugman’s most recent column, he states something obvious but very necessary in these times of attention deficits: Many of the candidates running for the GOP nomination promised the President’s policies, from the Affordable Care Act to investing borrowed money in the economy, would lead to financial calamity. They’ve been saying such things from early in his first term. Donald Trump predicted “massive inflation” and Rand Paul went so far as to raise the specter of America as a Weimar Republic. The Republican race may currently revolve around Trump’s Reality TV campaign, but sooner or later and certainly in the general-election, these terrible prognostications will be fodder.

Krugman’s opening:

What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates only named President Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile G.O.P. favorite, came up only four times.

Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just keeps failing to fail. And that’s a big problem for the G.O.P. — even bigger than Donald Trump.•

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In Andrew Schrank’s Pacific·Standard essay about Labor in the Digital Age, which imagines possible enlightened and benighted outcomes, he says the truest thing anyone can say on the topic: “The future of work and workers will not be dictated by technology alone.” No, it won’t.

An excerpt in which he looks at the Google Glass as half-full:

Is a jobless future inevitable? Do automation, computerization, and globalization necessarily conspire to undercut employment and living standards? Or might they be harnessed to benign ends by farsighted leaders? The answer is anything but obvious, for the relationship between automation and job loss is at best indeterminate, both within and across countries, and the relationship between automation and compensation is similarly opaque. For instance, Germany and Japan boast more robots per capita and less unemployment than the United States, and the stock of industrial robots and the average manufacturing wage have been growing in tandem—at double digit rates, no less—in China.

What excites me about the future of work and workers, therefore, is the possibility that the technological determinists are wrong, and that we will subordinate machinery to our needs and desires rather than vice versa. In this rosy scenario, machines take over the monotonous jobs and allow humans to pursue more leisurely or creative pursuits. Working hours fall and wages rise across the board. And productivity gains are distributed (and re-distributed) in accord with the principles of distributive justice and fairness.

While such a scenario may seem not just rosy but unrealistic, it is not entirely implausible.•

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You certainly don’t want to be a nation left behind by robotics any more than you’d want to miss out on the Industrial Revolution, but at the same time you need jobs for citizens of all skill levels. What to do?

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of reducing unemployment among the nation’s many unskilled workers is threatened by automation, a sector other countries in the region (particularly Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia) are investing heavily in. The need for cheap labor is disappearing just when the nation needs it most. From Natalie Obiko Pearson at Bloomberg:

Robots and automation are invigorating once-sleepy Indian factories, boosting productivity by carrying out low-skill tasks more efficiently. While in theory, improved output is good for economic growth, the trend is creating a headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Robots are diminishing roles for unskilled laborers that he wants to put to work as part of his Make in India campaign aimed at creating jobs for the poor.

India’s largely uneducated labor force and broken educational system aren’t ready for the more complex jobs that workers need when their low-skilled roles are taken over by machines. Meanwhile, nations employing robots more quickly, such as China, are becoming even more competitive.

“The need for unskilled labor is beginning to diminish,” Akhilesh Tilotia, head of thematic research at Kotak Institutional Equities in Mumbai and author of a book on India’s demographic impact. “Whatever education we’re putting in and whatever skill development we’re potentially trying to put out – – does it match where the industry will potentially be five to 10 years hence? That linkage is reasonably broken in India.” …

In the race to create factory jobs, Modi isn’t just competing against Asian rivals. Robots are increasingly helping developed economies. In Switzerland, robots make toothbrushes for export; in Spain, they cut and pack lettuce heads — a job previously done by migrants; in Germany, they fill tubs of ice cream, and in the U.K. they assemble yogurt into multipacks at a rate of 80 a minute.

 

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Peter Georgescu, Chairman Emeritus of Young & Rubicam, believes the conscious uncoupling of productivity and worker prosperity, if continued, will eventually lead to social unrest or drastic taxation in America.

That’s hopeful, really. It means citizens won’t forever settle for bread and Kardashians and will demand remedies for a sick system. In a New York Times op-ed about wealth disparity, Georgescu suggests preemptive steps corporations can take to move the haves and have-nots closer to one another, strategies that would require businesses to take a long-term view and unilaterally make concessions–not how things usually are done. He also doesn’t address how increasing automation might impact his prescriptions, but it’s still worth reading. An excerpt:

We business leaders know what to do. But do we have the will to do it? Are we willing to control the excessive greed so prevalent in our culture today and divert resources to better education and the creation of more opportunity?

Business has the most to gain from a healthy America, and the most to lose by social unrest or punitive taxation. Business can start the process in two steps. First, invest in the actual value creators — the employees. Start compensating fairly, by which I mean a wage that enables employees to share amply in productivity increases and creative innovations.

The fact that real wages have been flat for about four decades, while productivity has increased by 80 percent, shows that has not been happening. Before the early 1970s, wages and productivity were both rising. Now most gains from productivity go to shareholders, not employees.

Second, businesses must invest aggressively in their own operations, directing profit into productivity and innovation to boost real business performance. Today, too many corporations reduce investment in research and development and brand building. As a result, we see a general decline in the value of their brands and other assets. To make up for those declines and for anemic revenues, businesses buy back their stock (now at record levels) and thus artificially boost earnings per share.•

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Transhumanist Presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan penned a Vice article about the influence next-wave technologies may have on violent crime, which he views largely as a form of mental disease. A lot of it is pretty far out there–cranial implants modifying behavior, death-row inmates choosing to be cryogenically frozen, etc. I’ll grant that he’s right on two points:

1) Criminal behavior is modified already in many cases by prescription drugs and psychiatry.

2) Surveillance and tracking, for all the issues they bring, will make it increasingly difficult to stealthily commit traditional crimes.

But debates about cerebral reconditioning and lobotomy? Yikes. Sounds almost criminal.

From Istvan:

One other method that could be considered for death row criminals is cryonics. The movie Minority Report, which features precogs who can see crime activity in the future, show other ways violent criminals are dealt with: namely a form of suspended animation where criminals dream out their lives. So the concept isn’t unheard of. With this in mind, maybe violent criminals even today should legally be given the option for cryonics, to be returned to a living state in the future where the reconditioning of the brain and new preventative technology—such as ubiquitous surveillance—means they could no longer commit violent acts.

Speaking of extreme surveillance—that rapidly growing field of technology also presents near-term alternatives for criminals on death row that might be considered sufficient punishment. We could permanently track and monitor death row criminals. And we could have an ankle brace (or implant) that releases a powerful tranquilizer if violent behavior is reported or attempted.

Surveillance and tracking of criminals would be expensive to monitor, but perhaps in five to 10 years time basic computer recognition programs in charge of drones might be able to do the surveillance affordably. In fact, it might be cheapest just to have a robot follow a violent criminal around all the time, another technology that also should be here in less than a decade’s time. Violent criminals could, for example, only travel in driverless cars approved and monitored by local police, and they’d always be accompanied by some drone or robot caretaker.•

 

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Thinking Donald Trump ruined his campaign in the aftermath of the GOP debates with his gross and stupid comments about Megyn Kelly of Fox News is missing the point for two reasons:

1) A campaign based on bluster, bigotry, insult and ego cannot be undone by bluster, bigotry, insult and ego.

2) What Trump continues to do is speak brazenly to the underlying reality of the modern Republican Party, saying aloud the racist, sexist things that are its driving force. No coded language for him.

The GOP and Fox News have long cultivated bigotry–Kelly herself has made some gross and stupid comments–blaming black and brown people and women for encroaching on white, male privilege. Erick Erickson can feign outrage at Trump all he wants, but he’s at least as much of a sexist toolbox. Conservatives can pretend they’re repulsed by attacks on John McCain’s military service, but John Kerry and Tammy Duckworth were broadly given the same treatment. They can make believe that Trump calling Mexicans “rapists” is beyond the pale, but he’s just echoing what elected Republicans have said.

Trump is the GOP’s private dream and also its public nightmare. At long last, he’s the party’s reckoning.

Of course, someone at some point might actually ask him a detailed policy question instead of playing into his hand. But the ugliness beneath the surface isn’t going away.

From a NBC News report about its post-debate poll:

If Donald Trump’s comments about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly are hurting his standing in the Republican primary, it’s not showing in the numbers.

According to the latest NBC News Online Poll conducted by SurveyMonkey, Trump is at the top of the list of GOP candidates that Republican primary voters would cast a ballot for if the primary were being held right now.

The overnight poll was conducted for 24 hours from Friday evening into Saturday. During that period, Donald Trump stayed in the headlines due to his negative comments about Kelly and was dis-invited from a major conservative gathering in Atlanta.

None of that stopped Trump from coming in at the top of the poll with 23 percent. Sen. Ted Cruz was next on the list with 13 percent.

During the Fox News debate Thursday evening, Trump was the only Republican candidate to say he would not rule out a run as an independent candidate. According to this poll, that’s just fine with over half of his supporters. 54% of Trump supporters said they would vote for him for president, even if he didn’t win the GOP nomination. About one in five Trump supporters said they would switch and support the eventual Republican candidate.

 

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It would be great to ban autonomous-weapons systems, but you don’t really get to govern too far into the future from the present. Our realities won’t be tomorrow’s, and I fear that sooner or later the possible becomes the plausible. Hopefully, we can at least kick that can far enough down the road so that everyone will be awakened to the significant risks before they’ve been realized. As Peter Asaro makes clear in a Scientific American essay, there will be grave consequences should warfare be robotized. An excerpt:

Autonomous weapons pose serious threats that, taken together, make a ban necessary. There are concerns whether AI algorithms could effectively distinguish civilians from combatants, especially in complex conflict environments. Even advanced AI algorithms would lack the situational understanding or the ability to determine whether the use of violent force was appropriate in a given circumstance or whether the use of that force was proportionate. Discrimination and proportionality are requirements of international law for humans who target and fire weapons but autonomous weapons would open up an accountability gap. Because humans would no longer know what targets an autonomous weapon might select, and because the effects of a weapon may be unpredictable, there would be no one to hold responsible for the killing and destruction that results from activating such a weapon.

Then, as the Future of Life Institute letter points out, there are threats to regional and global stability as well as humanity. The development of autonomous weapons could very quickly and easily lead to arms races between rivals. Autonomous weapons would reduce the risks to combatants, and could thus reduce the political risks of going to war, resulting in more armed conflicts. Autonomous weapons could be hacked, spoofed and hijacked, and directed against their owners, civilians or a third party. Autonomous weapons could also initiate or escalate armed conflicts automatically, without human decision-making. In a future where autonomous weapons fight autonomous weapons the results would be intrinsically unpredictable, and much more likely lead to the mass destruction of civilians and the environment than to the bloodless wars that some envision. Creating highly efficient automated violence is likely to lead to more violence, not less.

There is also a profound moral question at stake.•

 

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The passage below from Rachel Nuwer’s BBC report about technological unemployment speaks to why I largely disagree with Jerry Kaplan that robotics will be far worse for male workers than female. There probably will be a difference, but if the machines come en masse in a compressed period of time, they come for most of us.

Oxford’s Carl Frey tells Nuwer that “overall, people should be happy that a lot of these jobs have actually disappeared,” when speaking of drudgery that’s heretofore been vanished by electrical gadgets, but the new reality may mean a tremendous aggregate improvement enjoyed by relatively few. In the long-term, that may all work itself out, but we better be ready with solutions in the short- and medium-term.

The excerpt:

Self-driving trucks wouldn’t be good news for everyone, however. Critics point out that, should this breakthrough be realised, there will be a significant knock-on effect for employment. In the US, up to 3.5 million drivers and 5.2 million additional personnel who work directly within the industry would be out of a job. Additionally, countless pit stops along well-worn trucking routes could become ghost towns. Self-driving trucks, in other words, might wreck millions of lives and bring disaster to a significant sector of the economy.

Dire warnings such as these are frequently issued, not only for the trucking industry, but for the world’s workforce at large. As machines, software and robots become more sophisticated, some fear that we stand to lose millions of jobs. According to one unpublished study, the coming wave of technological breakthroughs endangers up to 47% of total employment in the US.

But is there any truth to such projections, and if so, how concerned should we be? Will the robots take over, rendering us all professional couch potatoes, as imagined in the film Wall-E, or will technological innovation give us the freedom to pursue more creative, rewarding endeavours?•

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Donald Trump, a colostomy bag stuffed with ill-considered opinions, face-planted at the first GOP Presidential debate, but how far can you really fall when you live in the gutter? Some thought Trump would be surprisingly good in the forum since he has plenty of TV experience, but if you think about it, he only seems potent in those venues when he goes unchallenged, when he’s the boss. Like most bullies, he grows flustered when having to ward off a return blow.

Far more than any other venue, including reliably Lefty outlets like MSNBC, Fox News led Republicans to a horrifying national defeat in 2012, reassuring the faithful with dodgy poll readings that Barack Hussein couldn’t possibly gain a second term. That led to complacency during campaign season and shocked disbelief on Election Day. Reince Priebus and the party called for a full check-up, with the patient to begin a new course in the immediate future.

But not much has changed. Immigrants, women, LGBT people, universal health care and a sane foreign policy are still anathema to almost all the candidates. Perhaps the Fox moderators’ contentiousness was an attempt to awaken the contenders to another November nightmare, but it was most likely just another Reality TV show, with the hosts pushing buttons to gain ratings. For Trump, of course, it was a different kind of program from the one he’s used to–it was one where he could get fired.

The opening of Edward Luce’s predictably astute Financial Times analysis of the debate:

If clarity and geniality count for anything, Donald Trump was the loser of the Republican Party’s first 2016 debate.

With star billing in the biggest reality TV show of all, the property magnate struggled for rapport with the audience. At several points in the two-hour debate, he was booed.

In the post-debate autopsy, Fox News Channel’s focus groups found Mr Trump to be rude, lacking in specific answers and unpresidential. It is hard to believe the average television viewer would have come away feeling radically different.

Yet it is also hard to believe they did not already know all this about him before the show began. Mr Trump has held a double digit poll lead for several weeks. Might the debate have arrested his rise?

We will have to await the polls. But it is worth bearing in mind that at every point in Mr Trump’s steep ascent since mid-June, the political classes have called his peak — and been wrong. The Fox News debate may be no exception.•

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America was not a particularly militarized country until we were forced to enter WWII, and we haven’t been anything else ever since. Thanks, Germany.

In a Spiegel Q&A conducted by Joachim Mohr and Matthias Schepp, Pizza Hut salesman Mikhail Gorbachev doesn’t believe the world has any hope of being nuclear-free until the U.S. changes its mindset about defense. I could see the country conceding on nukes and reducing spending overall, but Gorbachev’s desire to see America stop creating new weapons systems seems unrealistic. DARPA is going to push robotics and AI as far as they can go. Gorbachev also allows that President Reagan was convinced that there could be no “winner” of a nuclear war, no matter his cowboy-ish bluster.

An excerpt:

Spiegel:

Can the goal of a nuclear free world still be achieved today?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

It is the correct goal in any case. Nuclear weapons are unacceptable. The fact that they can wipe out the entirety of civilization makes them particularly inhumane. Weapons like this have never existed before in history and they cannot be allowed to exist. If we do not get rid of them, sooner or later they will be used.

Spiegel:

In recent years, a number of new nuclear powers have emerged.

Mikhail Gorbachev:

That’s why we should not forget that the elimination of nuclear weapons is the obligation of every country that signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Though America and Russia have by far the largest arsenals at their disposal.

Spiegel:

What do you think of the oft-cited theory that mutually assured destruction prevents nuclear wars?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

There’s a dangerous logic in that. Here’s another question: If five or 10 countries are allowed to have nuclear weapons, then why can’t 20 or 30? Today, a few dozen countries have the technical prerequisites to build nuclear weapons. The alternative is clear: Either we move toward a nuclear-free world or we have to accept that nuclear weapons will continue to spread, step by step, across the globe. And can we really imagine a world without nuclear weapons if a single country amasses so many conventional weapons that its military budget nearly tops that of all other countries combined? This country would enjoy total military supremacy if nuclear weapons were abolished.

Spiegel:

You’re talking about the US?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

You said it. It is an insurmountable obstacle on the road to a nuclear-free world. That’s why we have to put demilitarization back on the agenda of international politics. This includes a reduction of military budgets, a moratorium on the development of new types of weapons and a prohibition on militarizing space. Otherwise, talks toward a nuclear-free world will be little more than empty words. The world would then become less safe, more unstable and unpredictable. Everyone will lose, including those now seeking to dominate the world.•

 

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Howard Schultz, the President of coffee, has been suggested (by…someone) as a potential game-changing Democratic candidate for those weary from Clinton fatigue. The Starbucks CEO has declared he’s not running, but he apparently loved being seriously considered (by…someone). Taking precious time from getting me my fucking five-dollar frappuccino while I stand here waiting, Schultz has penned a New York Times op-ed in perfect politician speak.

In it, he feigns that Washington gridlock is the result of equivalent irresponsibility of both parties rather than due to the modern GOP being insane, a time-tested gambit to make it appear one’s above the fray. He also declares from within his CEO bubble that “I have no intention of entering the presidential fray. I’m not done serving at Starbucks,” as if those two “nations” were equal. Well, in all fairness to him, only one of them is turning a profit. Schultz thinks we can improve as a country if we just embrace those different from us and try working together. Too bad Obama didn’t think of that.

At any rate, I should be grateful for the rare corporate executive who realizes the American middle class is going, going, gone–even if he might be adding to the problem. An excerpt:

Our nation has been profoundly damaged by a lack of civility and courage in Washington, where leaders of both parties have abdicated their responsibility to forge reasonable compromises to expand the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, improve schools, transform entitlement programs and so much more. We have become too desensitized to the horrendous metrics that define today’s America, from student-loan debt to food-stamp dependency to the size of our prison population.

As a boy growing up in public housing in Brooklyn, I was told by my mother that I could be the first in my family to graduate from college. A scholarship and an entry-level job at Xerox created a path upward that was typical for many of my generation.

For too many Americans, the belief that propelled me, that I had the opportunity to climb the ladder of prosperity, has greatly diminished. I hear it from coast to coast as I sit with customers in our stores. Six in 10 Americans believe that the younger generation will not be better off than their parents. Millennials have never witnessed politics devoid of toxicity. Anxiety, not optimism, rules the day.•

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New York City was always about money, but it wasn’t only about it. Now it is. 

The economist Tyler Cowen believes American cities will be only for the rich in the not-too-distant future, and that we’ll look back in wonder that poor people used to actually live in such glamorous places. I still don’t believe that’s true–or don’t want to believe it–but the NYC non-rich are being treated like suspects and moved out to the edges until they fall off. And it’s a long way down from there.

Real estate prices are booming, a global market snaps up addresses, Airbnb helps move rental stock off the market and subsidized rents are quickly disappearing. Sometimes I still like it here, walking in Soho or buying books at the Strand, but I do increasingly feel like an expat in the city where I’ve always lived.

From Michael Greenberg’s New York Review of Books piece about the documentary Homme Less:

The spike in prices has profoundly altered the psychology of these neighborhoods, threatening the security of thousands of long-term residents, many of them families with working parents. The transformation has been dizzyingly abrupt. The process of repopulating a neighborhood with a wealthier class of residents that took twenty years on the Lower East Side during the late 1990s and early 2000s can now occur in five years or less in some parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

In August 2013, for example, Burke Leighton Asset Management bought 805 St. Marks Avenue, a pre-war, six-story building with two hundred apartments in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, for $22 million. In May, a little more than a year and a half later, they sold it to a Swedish real estate company called Akelius for $44 million. Akelius’s CEO said that he decided to invest in Crown Heights when he saw an increasing number of young people with “single-speed bicycles” in the neighborhood. I’ve no knowledge of Akelius’s plans for the building, but the only sure way to derive a reasonable return from this level of investment would be to find a means to deregulate the rent-stabilized apartments, and this invariably involves dislodging the families who live in them.

Over the past fifteen years New York has lost more than 200,000 units of affordable housing—20 percent of the current stock. The rate of loss has accelerated in recent years, putting the future of the city’s remaining rent-regulated apartments in grave doubt. What becomes of a city that economically bars its working class from living in it? New York may be in the process of finding out. Once apartments become deregulated, they never come back.

Where do the dislodged go? And how many are there?•

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The success of China’s insta-cities is dubious even with the iron fist of authoritarianism set to crush dissenters, but dense “cities in a building” or “cities in the sky,” attempts at large-scale, ecologically friendly developments influenced by the work of the late Arcology designer Paolo Soleri, have a particularly spotty track record. Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City (even a diminished version) may prove the exception, but top-down developments seldom satisfy human desires, even if they’re ostensibly good for us.

In a smart Aeon essay, Jared Keller writes of Soleri’s Arizona desert dream and explores why its offshoots, potential goldmines, don’t pan out. An excerpt:

In 1956, Soleri and his wife Corolyn ‘Colly’ Woods moved just miles from Phoenix’s out-of-control suburban sprawl to set up an architectural workshop, dubbed Cosanti (from the Italiancosa and anti, or ‘before things’), in Paradise Valley to develop his unique philosophy of architecture. One of Soleri’s earliest visions was Mesa City, a proposed city the size of Manhattan with 2 million inhabitants. Over five years, Soleri would draw hundreds of feet of scrolls detailing the intricate structures and landscape of this hypothetical metropolis.

In 1970, Soleri finally broke ground on Arcosanti, an experimental city and ‘urban laboratory’ that has been under construction for nearly half a century. To the average visitor, Arcosanti looks like a college campus sprouting in the middle of the desert, molded from the red silt of the surrounding mesa. The complex is marked by a cluster of soaring stone apses, crafted in Soleri’s distinct, casting-inspired architectural style, designed to absorb sunlight and power the town’s energy grid. The majority of buildings are oriented to the south to capture the sun’s light and heat, while an open roof design yields maximum sunlight in the winter and shade in the summer. Artisans live and work in a densely packed compound, designed for maximum energy efficiency and sustainability. The community’s permanent residents keep greenhouses and agricultural fields, and income from bell-casting goes to maintaining the town’s infrastructure.

Arcosanti is as socially efficient as it is sustainable. The buildings and walkways are built in a more dynamic formation than a conventional city grid, not just to conserve resources but also to encourage increased social interaction between residents, forcing them to bump into each other in various open-air atriums, gardens and greenhouses. Living quarters are clustered in a honeycomb of sparse, minimalist apartments, all virtually identical. The open design and emphasis on sustainable living has created a distinctly hippy, communitarian vibe; the population of the town is mostly Soleri fanatics and bell-casting artisans. The city has never been officially finished, and while the current population wavers around 80, the town was designed to sustain some 5,000. …

Despite Soleri’s best efforts, it’s not clear that humanity is ready for the perfect architectural utopias he imagined.•

 

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Two videos about the changing nature of work in America.

The first is a PBS Newshour report by Paul Solman about technological unemployment, featuring some very dire predictions by Humans Need Not Apply author Jerry Kaplan, who believes robot caddies and delivery bots will lead to displaced, starving workers who’ll die in the streets if serious measures aren’t taken. Well, that could happen, though there’s no reason it need to.

The second is a Financial Times piece by Anna Nicolaou about the coworking startup WeWork, which leases monthly space to telecommuters who long to tether–a “capitalist kibbutz” as its called by founder Adam Neumann. My reaction to the company is that it seems especially prone to a bad financial downturn, but I would bet Neumann would argue the reverse, that short-term leases would be more attractive at such a time. At any rate, it’s an interesting look into the dynamic of the modern office space.

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I think, sadly, that Aubrey de Grey will die soon, as will the rest of us. A-mortality is probably theoretically possible, though I think it will be awhile. But the SENS radical gerontologist has probably done more than anyone to get people to rethink aging as a disease to be cured rather than an inevitability to be endured. In the scheme of things, that paradigm shift has enormous (and hopefully salubrious) implications. De Grey just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

What is the likelihood that someone who is 40 (30? 20? 10?) today will have their life significantly extended to the point of practical immortality? 

Is it a slow, but rapidly rising collusion of things that are going to cause this, or is it something that is going to kind of snap into effect one day?

Will the technology be accessible to everyone, or will it be reserved for the rich?

What are your thoughts on cryonics?

What is your personal preferred method of achieving practical immortality? Nanotechnology? Cyborgs? Something else?

Aubrey de Grey:

I’d put it at 60, 70, 80, 90% respectively.

Kind of snap, in that we will reach longevity escape velocity.

For everyone, absolutely for certain.

Cryonics (not cryogenics) is a totally reasonable and valid research area and I am signed up with Alcor.

Anything that works! – but I expect SENS to get there first.

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Question:

Before defeating aging, what if we were to first defeat cardiovascular disease or cancer or Alzheimer’s disease? Do you think this would be enough to make people snap of of their “pro-aging trance” and be more optimistic about the feasibility & desirability of SENS and other rejuvenation therapies?

EDIT: Do you think people would be more convinced by more cosmetic rejuvenation therapies instead (reversal of hair loss/graying, reduction of wrinkles and spots in the skin)?

Aubrey de Grey:

Not a chance. People’s main problem is that they have a microbe in their brains called “aging” that they think means something distinct from diseases. The only way that will change is big life extension in mice.

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Question:

Long life for our ability to continue to develop ourselves, explore the world, gain knowledge, and create is great. The goal however has different paths, from genetic manipulation to body cyborgization. Some speak of mind uploading but who knows if that’s possible, as mind transfer implies dualism.

Is one preferable over another?

And what is your opinion on the potential of our unstable interconnected world to negatively impact our potential for progress from things like ecological collapse, global warming, etc.? I feel like it’s a race between disaster and scientific progress, can we out run chaos? Or is this a false dichotomy, maybe the future is a world of suffering and a few individuals have military grade cyborg tech.

Aubrey de Grey:

I don’t think mind transfer necessarily implies dualism, and I’m all for exploring all options.

I am quite sure we can outrun chaos.

__________________________

Question:

I’ve been learning more and more lately about the work that you do in the fight to end aging, and fully believe that it is both possible and just over the horizon. How can the general public get involved in the fight other than donating?

Aubrey de Grey:

Money is the bottleneck, I’m afraid, so the next best thing to donating is getting others to donate.

__________________________

Question:

We really appreciate all your work. Some people have expressed concerns that these anti-aging techniques and treatments won’t be available to everyone, but only to the extremely wealthy. Are there strategies to prevent this?

Aubrey de Grey:

Yes – they are called elections. Those in power want to stay there.•

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Like most Atlantic readers, I go to the site for the nonstop Shell ads but stay for the articles. 

Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply, has written a piece for the publication which argues that women will fare much better than men if technological unemployment becomes widespread and entrenched, the gender biases among jobs and careers favoring them. I half agree with him. 

Take for instance his argument that autonomous cars will decimate America’s three million truck drivers (overwhelmingly men) but not disrupt the nation’s three million secretaries (overwhelmingly women). That’s not exactly right. The trucking industry, when you account for support work, is estimated to provide eight million jobs, including secretarial positions. Truckers spend cash at diners and coffee shops and such, providing jobs that are still more often filled by females. And just because autonomous trucks won’t eliminate secretarial positions, that doesn’t mean other technologies won’t. That effort to displace office-support staff has been a serious goal for at least four decades, and the technology is probably ready to do so now.

This, of course, also doesn’t account for the many women who’ve entered into white-collar professions long dominated by men, many of which are under threat. But I think Kaplan is correct in saying that the middle-class American male is a particularly endangered species if this new reality takes hold, and there won’t likely be any organic solution coming from within our current economic arrangement.

Kaplan’s opening:

Many economists and technologists believe the world is on the brink of a new industrial revolution, in which advances in the field of artificial intelligence will obsolete human labor at an unforgiving pace. Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.

This is a dire prediction, but one whose consequences will not fall upon society evenly. A close look at the data reveals a surprising pattern: The jobs performed primarily by women are relatively safe, while those typically performed by men are at risk.

It should come as no surprise that despite progress on equality in the labor force, many common professions exhibit a high degree of gender bias. For instance, of the 3 million truck drivers in the U.S., more than 95 percent are men; of the nearly 3 million secretaries and administrative assistants, more than 95 percent are women. Autonomous vehicles are a not-too-distant possibility, and when they arrive, those drivers’ jobs will evaporate; office-support workers suffer no such imminent threat.•

 

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In a tweet she published in the uproar after Cecil the lion’s killing, Roxane Gay delivered a line as funny and heartbreaking as anything George Carlin or Richard Pryor could have conjured. It was this:

I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.”

It speaks brilliantly to racial injustice and the unequal way our empathy is aroused. Later on, in a separate tweet, the critic said something much less true while defending that great line:

Speciesism is not a thing.

Oh, it is a thing. We’ve based so much of our world on that very thing, and all of us, even those who’ve tried to be somewhat kinder, have benefited from this arrangement.

In a winding Foreign Affairs piece that traces the history of the long struggle against animal cruelty, Humane Society CEO Wayne Pacelle reveals what is uneven but significant progress and how the movement, which coalesced around a book written 40 years ago by moral philosopher Peter Singer, gained steam after shifting tactics, replacing moralizing with legislative efforts. An excerpt:

There was forward progress, many setbacks through the decades, and a wave of lawmaking in the early 1970s, but the biggest catalyst for change came with the publication of Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation in 1975.

Singer’s book spurred advocates to form hundreds more local and national animal protection groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 1980. I was part of that wave, forming an animal protection group as an undergraduate at Yale University in 1985, protesting cruelty, screening films, and generally trying to shine a light on large-scale systemic abuses that few wanted to acknowledge. This grass-roots activism pushed established groups to step up their calls for reform and adopt more campaign-oriented tactics. Nevertheless, throughout the 1980s, the animal protection movement was still fundamentally about protest. The issues that animal advocates raised were unfamiliar and challenging, and their demands were mainly for people to reform their lifestyles. Asking someone to stop eating meat or to buy products not tested on animals was a hard sell, because people don’t like to change their routines, and because practical, affordable, and easily available alternatives were scarce.

It was not until the 1990s that the animal protection movement adopted a legislative strategy and became more widely understood and embraced. A few groups had been doing the political spadework needed to secure meaningful legislative reforms, focusing mostly on the rescue and sheltering of animals. Then organizations such as the HSUS and the Fund for Animals started introducing ballot measures to establish protections, raise awareness, and demonstrate popular support for reform. The ball got rolling with a successful initiative in 1990 to outlaw the trophy hunting of mountain lions in California, which was followed by the 1992 vote in Colorado to protect bears. Other states followed suit with measures to outlaw cockfighting, dove hunting, greyhound racing, captive hunts, the use of steel-jawed traps for killing fur-bearing mammals, and the intensive confinement of animals on factory farms. Today, activists are working to address the inhumane slaughter of chickens and turkeys, the captive display of marine mammals, the hunting of captive wildlife, and the finning of sharks for food. The United States alone now counts more than 20,000 animal protection groups, with perhaps half of them formed in just the last decade. The two largest groups, the HSUS and the ASPCA, together raise and spend nearly $400 million a year and have assets approaching $500 million.•

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Even if it’s difficult to believe now, imagine someone as recently as 2000 suggesting that cars powered by internal combustion engines would be out of California showrooms by 2030 and off the state’s highways by 2050, that they’d be replaced by zero-emission vehicles, one-hundred percent of them. Even think about someone hatching that plan ten years ago, when the electric car was all but considered killed. The seemingly impossible dream looks likely to become a reality thanks to great leaps in technology running headlong into the unique politics of a state demanding change. Amusingly enough, it’s something Governor Ronald Reagan tried to jump-start in 1969.

At the heart of the push is Mary Nichols, Chair of the California Air Resources Board. The opening of John Lippert’s Bloomberg article about how she’s ending Big Auto’s business as usual in the Golden State:

Sergio Marchionne had a funny thing to say about the $32,500 battery-powered Fiat 500e that his company markets in California as “eco-chic.” “I hope you don’t buy it,” he told his audience at a think tank in Washington in May 2014. He said he loses $14,000 on every 500e he sells and only produces the cars because state rules re­quire it. Marchionne, who took over the bailed-out Chrysler in 2009 to form Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, warned that if all he could sell were electric vehicles, he would be right back looking for another govern­ment rescue.

So who’s forcing Marchionne and all the other major automakers to sell mostly money-losing electric vehicles? More than any other person, it’s Mary Nichols. She’s run the California Air Resources Board since 2007, championing the state’s zero-emission-vehicle quotas and backing Pres­ident Barack Obama’s national mandate to double average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. She was chairman of the state air regulator once before, a generation ago, and cleaning up the famously smoggy Los Angeles skies is just one accomplish­ment in a four-decade career.

Nichols really does intend to force au­tomakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency’s heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regula­tions today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California’s famous highways. “If we’re going to get our transportation system off petroleum,” she says, “we’ve got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now.”•

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In his Pacific·Standard piece, “The Second Industrious Revolution,” Louis Hyman uses the phrase “precarious work” is the describe the new Gig Economy, which would be destabilizing if widespread. With so much of Labor prone to automation and robotization and no suitable replacement work presently in view, it’s time for Americans to start envisioning solutions that don’t impede progress but instead create stability that allows us to thrive within the new realities. Like Andrew McAfee, Eric Brynjolfsson, Martin Ford and numerous others, Hyman believes basic income may become a necessity. An excerpt:

All sorts of exciting technologies will reinforce this industrious revolution, but it is not the technology that deserves our attention. It is the people whose lives will be turned upside down. Scholars and activists are concerned about this rise in precarious work, but instead of fighting the work, we need to understand how to empower workers to take advantage of this revolution—before it is too late.

The first industrious and industrial revolutions inaugurated several centuries of social dislocation, as well as unprecedented economic growth. Not until the mid-20th century, in the heyday of post-war capitalism, did we find a way to create economic security in a wage-work economy: a steady paycheck, health insurance, and home ownership. But, almost as soon as these happened, they began to go away.

We should use this coming crisis as an opportunity to return to our core American values. An older American Dream, the Jeffersonian vision of independent farmers, was promoted by the federal government in the 19th century through the Homestead Act, which provided farm land to our citizens. It was a way to push back against the rise of wage labor, which was seen as dependent and an antithesis to American values.

In today’s digital economy, we need a comparable act that empowers us to make our own way in business. While we often discuss the American Dream in terms of consumption, there is another American Dream that is more visceral: control over one’s work. The longing many Americans feel for owning their own business, the celebration of entrepreneurship in our culture, and our homesteading heritage are not just about money—or buying houses. Yet for several generations we have made it easy to own a home, but hard to own our own businesses.

Workers don’t need land, but they do need other kinds of support—health insurance, skilled education, maybe even a basic income—to take the risks upon which success depends.•

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We’ll likely be richer and healthier in the long run because of the Digital Revolution, but before the abundance, there will probably be turbulence.

A major reorganization of Labor among hundreds of millions promises to be bumpy, a situation requiring deft political solutions in a time not known for them. It’s great if Weak AI can handle the rote work and free our hands, but what will we do with them then? And how will we balance a free-market society that’s also a highly automated one?

In a Washington Post piece, Matt McFarland wisely assesses the positive and negatives of the new order. Two excerpts follow.

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Just as the agrarian and industrial revolutions made us more efficient and created more value, it follows that the digital revolution will do the same.

[Geoff] Colvin believes as the digital revolution wipes out jobs, new jobs will place a premium on our most human traits. These should be more satisfying than being a cog on an assembly line.

“For a long period, really dating to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, our jobs became doing machine-like work, that the machines of the age couldn’t do it. The most obvious example being in factories and assembly-line jobs,” Colvin told me. “We are finally achieving an era in which the machines actually can do the machine-like work. They leave us to do the in-person, face-to-face work.”

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If self-driving cars and automated drone delivery become a reality, what happens to every delivery driver, truck driver and cab driver? Swaths of the population won’t be able to be retrained with skills needed in the new economy. Inequality will rise.

“One way or another it’s going to be kind of brutal,” [Jerry] Kaplan said. “When you start talking about 30 percent of the U.S. population being on the edge of losing their jobs, it’s not going to be a pleasant life and you’re going to get this enormous disparity between the haves and the have nots.”•

 

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The good and bad part of decentralization is the same: There is no center. That allows for all sorts of new possibilities, some of them good.

As I’ve argued before, the U.S. government, that reviled and feared thing, will have less and less ability to control it all, despite surveillance. You don’t have to be a paranoid Birther to see this new reality being born. Even the most suspicious among us may someday long for a strong federal presence.

Speaking of the center not holding: David Amsden’s excellent New York Times Magazine article “Who Runs the Streets of New Orleans?” looks at the privatization of some policing in the French Quarter, a remarkable square mile that’s been marred by mayhem since the destabilizing tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. In response, a single wealthy New Orleans citizen, Sidney Torres, who made his treasure hauling trash, entered into a tech-forward joint effort with the city to fight crime. It may ultimately make things safer, but, of course, there are many dangers in privatizing policing, in having an unelected individual with money dictate policy based on personal beliefs or even whims. There can be a mission creep that doesn’t just target criminals, but also the impoverished and minorities, creating a tale of two cities. While that may not sound too different than current public policing in America, at least elected officials have to answer to those issues.

An excerpt:

In the United States, private police officers currently outnumber their publicly funded counterparts by a ratio of roughly three to one. Whereas in past decades the distinction was often clear — the rent-a-cop vs. the real cop — today the boundary between the two has become ‘‘messy and complex,’’ according to a study last year by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Torres’s task force is best understood in this context, one where the larger merging of private and public security has resulted in an extensive retooling of the nation’s policing as a whole. As municipal budgets have stagnated or plummeted, state and local governments have taken to outsourcing police work to the private sector, resulting in changes that have gone largely unnoticed by the public they’re tasked with protecting.

A recent report by the Justice Department, which has become one of the most prominent advocates of such collaborative efforts, identified 450 partnerships in the country between law enforcement and the private sector. Nationwide, there are now more than 1,200 ‘‘business improvement districts’’ in which businesses pay self-imposed taxes to fund improved services, including security. In many cases, officers covered by corporate entities have become indistinguishable from those paid for by taxpayers. Last year, Facebook entered into a three-year partnership with the Menlo Park, Calif., Police Department in which the social-media giant agreed to pay the $194,000 salary of a police officer whose job was going to be cut. One of the largest private security forces in the nation today is the University of Chicago Police, which has full jurisdiction over 65,000 residents, only 15,000 of whom are students. More than 100 public housing projects in Boston are patrolled by private security, including one company that has been authorized to arrest suspects under certain circumstances.•

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In a great Matter piece about the nightmare of climate change, Margaret Atwood revisits a 2009 Die Zeit article she wrote about possible outcomes for a future in which the world is no longer based on oil: one of accommodation, one of ruin and another in which some states are more capable of managing a post-peak tomorrow than others, a planet still inhabited by haves and have-nots, though one rewritten according to new realities.

Atwood asks these questions, among others: “Can we change our energy system? Can we change it fast enough to avoid being destroyed by it?” Despite it all, the novelist holds out hope that we can master an “everything change,” as she terms it.

An excerpt:

Then there’s Picture Two. Suppose the future without oil arrives very quickly. Suppose a bad fairy waves his wand, and poof! Suddenly there’s no oil, anywhere, at all.

Everything would immediately come to a halt. No cars, no planes; a few trains still running on hydroelectric, and some bicycles, but that wouldn’t take very many people very far. Food would cease to flow into the cities, water would cease to flow out of the taps. Within hours, panic would set in.

The first result would be the disappearance of the word “we”: except in areas with exceptional organization and leadership, the word “I” would replace it, as the war of all against all sets in. There would be a run on the supermarkets, followed immediately by food riots and looting. There would also be a run on the banks — people would want their money out for black market purchasing, although all currencies would quickly lose value, replaced by bartering. In any case the banks would close: their electronic systems would shut down, and they’d run out of cash.

Having looted and hoarded some food and filled their bathtubs with water, people would hunker down in their houses, creeping out into the backyards if they dared because their toilets would no longer flush. The lights would go out. Communication systems would break down. What next? Open a can of dog food, eat it, then eat the dog, then wait for the authorities to restore order. But the authorities — lacking transport — would be unable to do this.•

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Ted Cruz, who’s trailing my left testicle in the race for the GOP Presidential nomination (“Vote Ball ’16!”), must be flummoxed, feeling he should be the rightful leader of the Cliven Bundy wing of the Republican Party. Did he not engineer a shutdown of the entire government for no good reason? Hasn’t this Canadian immigrant shown adequate disdain for “foreigners”? Has he not tirelessly opposed gay marriage, even though he demands government otherwise not encroach on personal liberties? Has he not made every effort to dismantle Obamacare (when not busy signing up for it)? This man has bona fides.

Unfortunately for him and others, Donald Trump, a craps table with a combover, has won over the “crazies,” as John “Complete the danged fence!” McCain has called them. It’s difficult for President Trump to lose support because he doesn’t particularly stand for anything, apart from a vicious brand of entitlement stoked by prejudice. If you’re on board with that, mere facts won’t deter you.

From Megan Murphy at the Financial Times:

Absent a catastrophic implosion, Mr Trump has a lock on one of the coveted spots in the first primetime Republican debate on August 6. Given the sheer size of the party field, Fox News, the event’s host, has said only the top 10 candidates will appear on stage, as determined by an average of five as yet undisclosed national polls.

As lesser-known figures scramble to make the cut, top-tier contenders such as Mr Bush are grappling with how to avoid getting trumped by a man who is a master of publicity and self-promotion.

“Debates are still gladiatorial battles,” said Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist. “It is the coliseum, and we do it to see who emerges as the victor.”

A stage with Mr Trump on it creates a challenge for candidates who have so far chosen to focus mostly on their own messages as opposed to attacking a man who kicked off his campaign by labelling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals” and has since struck a chord with voters who fret the US is in decline.

Imagine a NASCAR driver mentally preparing for a race knowing one of the drivers will be drunk. That’s what prepping for this debate is like.”•

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Should I say a short story about climate-change apocalypse is fun? Choire Sicha’s brief, new Matter fiction, “Table of Contents,” certainly is, though it’s suitably sobering as well. The author imagines a scenario in which the seas have risen in a bad mood, and the narrator tries to aid the survivors by printing key entries from our modern Library of Alexandria, Wikipedia, before the plug is pulled. The opening:

I don’t know which will last longer, the paper or the ink. Eventually the paper will burn or the ink will fade, so read this all as fast as you can.

But of Wikipedia’s five-million articles, these 40,000 seemed to be the most super-important.

They’re crammed in these eight plastic-bagged boxes. because I printed it all single-side. That way you can make notes on the back! For instance, definitely keep track of who has babies with whom. (See the page for Incest, then check Consanguinity.) I put in some Bics, they should last a few… years? No idea.

After that, you can look up the Pen page.

I also put in Pen (Enclosure) in case you domesticate animals later.

In any event, please do not leave the entirety of portable human knowledge out in the rain.•

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